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The Cajun Kingdom Of the Bayou

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WHILE most of us spend our lives on terra firma, the Cajuns of southern Louisiana are an amphibious people, inhabiting a world of swamps and bayous, as comfortable on the water as they are on dry land.

They chose their watery habitat on purpose. Uprooted first from France and then from Nova Scotia, they were looking for a homeland from which they could never be dislocated again. In the backwaters of Louisiana, they found such a home.

If the Cajuns chose their home specifically for its remoteness, modern amenities such as bridges and causeways have changed all that. Cajun Country -- more properly Acadiana -- is a triangle of 22 parishes that extends from the Texas border east to New Orleans. It is an easy jaunt from New Orleans, perfect for a two- or three-day tour, a voyage across time as well as geography. Spring and fall are the good times to go, unless you're a glutton for heat.

The word Cajun is a colloquial shortening of Acadian, meaning one of those from Acadia -- now Nova Scotia. In 1755, these French Catholics refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Protestant King of England and were exiled.

The story was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic poem, "Evangeline," the tale of a young Acadian woman who is separated from her lover, Gabriel, in the chaos of the emigration and spends the rest of her life looking for him. Evangeline is still one of the great figures of Acadian culture. While Longfellow ended the tale in Philadelphia, a local version of the legend has Evangeline finally tracking Gabriel to the town of St. Martinville, near Lafayette, only to find that he has married another woman. In her grief, Evangeline dies there, which explains the presence of the Evangeline Oak and the Evangeline grave in the town.

The Acadian diaspora brought the Cajuns south, some by way of the Mississippi River, some by way of the Atlantic Coast where the British colonists made them unwelcome. Still others returned to France, where they were rerouted to the new French colony called Nouvelle Orleans. Uncomfortable in the urban environment, they moved out into the swamps west and south of New Orleans, where they would never again be under the thumb of foreign authority.

Acadiana extends from Avoyelles Parish in the north, west to the Texas border and south like a great arm reaching under Baton Rouge and New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. To this day, most of the southernmost parishes of Terrebone and Lafourche are inaccessible by road.

It is difficult to estimate the size of the contemporary Cajun population. Jacques Henry of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, a state agency, said 300,000 of the state's four million residents say they speak French at home. Some 900,000 residents of Louisiana claim full or partial French ancestry. The difficulties are compounded because it is not uncommon for Cajuns to have Irish, Italian or German surnames nowadays, Mr. Henry said.

Many Cajuns earn their living as ranchers, raising sheep and cattle; others grow sugar cane, rice and soybeans. In the days of Louisiana's oil boom a decade or two ago, the oil industry and oil-related businesses were the largest employer in Acadiana, but Kelly Strenge of the Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission said more people now worked either in the medical-services industry or in tourist-related service businesses.

Lafayette, a city of 92,000 people, lies in the middle of Acadiana, and it is the capital of Cajun Country. Once a sprawling boom town financed by oil money, Lafayette's growth has slowed in recent years. For the tourist, the historic downtown district with its cathedral, courthouse and early homes provides a sense of the early years of Cajun culture in the area.

A two-day outing from New Orleans will get you there and back with some sightseeing each day. Three days allow time for exploration farther west into the Lake Charles area and north into Eunice and Opelousas, home of the so-called prairie Cajuns who raise sheep and cattle.

We took Route 90 from New Orleans, dipping southwest into Houma where the road swings northwest through Morgan City, where the first Tarzan movie was filmed in 1917 and the first offshore oil well drilled in 1947.

By late morning, we had come to Avery Island, just outside New Iberia. This is one of the true curiosities of the modern industrial age. Avery Island is the only place in the world where Tabasco pepper sauce is made. The McIlhenny family has been making the same sauce from a special red pepper since 1868.

The free tour of the old brick factory is offered along with a brief movie about the history of the factory and a tiny bottle of the hot stuff. What's more, in the gift shop you'll see the largest bottles of Tabasco you've ever seen, gallon-size.

For bird and plant lovers are the Jungle Gardens and Bird Sanctuary, developed by Edward Avery McIlhenny, with assorted local plants and birds. Early spring and summer are the times for seeing huge flocks of egrets and herons; ducks and other waterfowl come for the winter. The gardens are filled with camellias, azaleas and tropical plants in season. The Chinese Garden contains a Buddha dating from A.D. 1000.

A must-see of this trip is Vermilionville in Lafayette, a Cajun and Creole village opened in April 1990 and financed by the taxpayers of Lafayette Parish. Vermilionville is done in the style of Colonial Williamsburg and Plimouth Plantation, with people in authentic dress doing the things they would have done in the period, roughly, from 1765 to 1890.

The walk around Vermilionville begins at the Visitor's Center and goes past six Cajun-Creole fast food bars and a restaurant that features La Cuisine de Maman.

(A note here: Creole is one of those terms about which people love to argue. The term is most easily translated as homegrown, or indigenous to the area. Hence, there is French Creole, Spanish Creole and so on.)

Cooking and baking classes are offered in the cooking school, and regular concerts, plays and storytelling at the performance center.

The soft-spoken blond man at the boat-building shed sands away on his hand-carved boat, patiently and tirelessly answering the most basic questions (Q.: What is a bayou? A.: Technically, a small stream).

THE weaver in the 1840 Beau Bassin House spins at the wheel, enthusiastically sharing her natural-dye recipes. Most of the year, she uses them on wool and cotton. At Easter time, children are invited from the outside to try their hands at old-time egg dyeing.

There are 21 buildings to visit in all, among them:

* The farmstead of Amand Broussard, an 18th-century Acadian settler. Visitors to the farm are transported by hand-pulled ferry.

* An early Acadian barn, featuring decoy-carving, net-making and boat-building.

* An early schoolhouse that serves as the site for lectures on Cajun and Creole culture.

* Sites with demonstrations of activities from making toys and musical instruments to furniture, candles, soap, baskets and other basics.

* La Chapelle des Attakapas, where weddings, Latin services and lectures on religious customs are held. In the priest's house and the adjacent cemetery, there are lectures on the more exotic elements of Cajun-Creole religion such as voodoo and Mardi Gras. Allow at least three hours to visit Vermilionville. Setting aside a full day enables you to take advantage of the historical presentations.

One of the local history experts who helped found and organize Vermilionville is Coerte (pronounced CURT) Voorhies who, with his wife Marjorie, runs the Bois des Chenes Inn in Lafayette. For history lovers, this is the place to stay.

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Mr. Voorhies is descended from Dutch New York ancestors and from the Mouton family, who were Cajun gentry. Their home, built in 1820 and restored to that style by Mr. Voorhies, was once the plantation home of Charles Mouton, son of Gen. Jean Mouton, an important figure in early Louisiana history.

Mr. Voorhies offers a tour of the house and its furnishings in as much or as little detail as the guests choose. Most of the furnishings are period antiques of Louisiana French origin, complemented by some American pieces of the period. The man is a veritable encyclopedia of Cajun history, from military battles to the style of armoires. He also offers swamp and marsh expeditions for naturalists (you'll need at least a small group) and seasonal hunting and fishing trips.

Three of the four suites at the Bois des Chenes are in the carriage house behind the plantation house and one is in a separate outbuilding. All come with large, immaculate private bathrooms and period furnishings. The upstairs suite is furnished in country Acadian style; the two downstairs suites are done in Louisiana Empire and Victorian styles, reflecting the various periods of Cajun culture.

The price of the room at the Bois des Chenes includes an enormous breakfast cooked by Mrs. Voorhies -- you must at least taste the boudin, a Cajun sausage -- with French toast that her husband proclaims "the best in the world."

Come dinner time, the Voorhies are likely to send you to one of two local Cajun restaurants: Randol's or Mulate's. Both are right around the Lafayette area and both offer classic Cajun menus -- heaping piles of steamed crayfish (after November); jambalaya, the Cajun dish of rice, chicken and sausage, and gumbo, a thick rice-and-seafood stew.

In addition to the menu, the attraction at both restaurants is the Cajun bands that play every night. Both Cajun music, played with a squeeze-box accordion, triangle and guitar, and its more contemporary cousin, Zydeco, have become enormously popular in recent years. This is not sit-down music, and both restaurants have large dance floors where the locals promise not to laugh as you try out your two-step or waltz. Watch first -- it's not hard.

This particular Mulate's, one of three in Louisiana, is 15 miles from Lafayette in Breaux Bridge. Local people know it for the bronzed shoes of dancers that hang over the dance floor, side by side with the logos of the local and national news teams that have done stories on the place.

We chose Randol's, largely for convenience. The building and the decor -- plain tables and booths, crab nets hanging from the ceiling -- were nothing special, which gave the place a wonderfully authentic, distinctly non-nouvelle feel. Randol's is about the food, much of it imported from the seafood processing plant right out back, and music, which is available every night of the week.

If you prefer your music sitting down, catch the Rendez Vous des Cajuns at the Liberty Center in Eunice every Saturday from 6 to 8 P.M. This is a live radio show, presented by the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park System and held in the Cajun version of Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. The show also features Cajun humorists and recipes. The show is in French, although the M.C. switches to English from time to time. Eunice is about a 60-minute drive from Lafayette, and the price of admission is a very reasonable $2.

After you've eaten the food and danced to the music, the other piece of Acadiana is the swamp itself, specifically the Atchafalaya Basin. There are a variety of swamp tours operating out of Henderson, west of Lafayette on Interstate 10 -- we chose the one at McGee's Landing.

There are no families still living in stilt-villages; many of them moved to houseboats along the riverbank to take advantage of electricity after the Army Corps of Engineers created a levee system throughout the basin in the 1930's. The tour is, of course, about the flora and fauna of the swamp, but it is also about the humor of a people who love to laugh at themselves almost as much as they love to laugh at the law.

The guides are accomplished storytellers, with a vast repertory of tales about Thibodeaux and Fontenot, two ne'er-do-well buddies who get along and go along by their wits, and their compatriots, such as Old Man Boudreaux, who gets the better of the game warden with a stick of dynamite.

The swamp itself is a fascinating, watery nether world of cypress trees -- once badly overharvested and now protected by law -- and the willow trees that were planted to replace the cypresses.

The plague of the swamp now is the water hyacinth, a beautiful water plant imported from Japan by a private homeowner. The water hyacinth, with its spectacular purple flowers, is so prolific that it threatens to clog the waterways and requires periodic harvesting, another encroachment of the outside world on a once-inaccessible place. A VISITOR'S GUIDE TO CAJUN COUNTRY Getting There

In New Orleans, pick up Interstate 90 and take it south across the Mississippi River toward Houma, where the road swings west to Morgan City. After Morgan City, I-90 turns northwest to New Iberia and Lafayette. Total distance to Lafayette is 162 miles. Sights

Avery Island is a well-marked lefthand turn off I-90 close to New Iberia. The Tabasco Country Store and Visitor Center is open Monday to Friday from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. and Saturday from 9 A.M. to noon. Admission is free. The Jungle Gardens and Bird Sanctuary, also on Avery Island and just as clearly marked, is open daily all year long from 9 to 5. Admission is $4.25; children from 6 to 12, $3.25. Information: (318) 365-8173.

Vermilionville is at 1600 Surrey Street in Lafayette. It is closed on Christmas and New Year's Day, and has longer hours between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Admission: $8, students $5 and children under 6 free. Telephone: (800) 992-2968.

To reach McGee's Landing, take Interstate 10 east from Lafayette. Take Exit 115 to Henderson. Go through Henderson to the levee and turn right on top of the levee. It's two miles to McGee's. There are four tours a day at 10 A.M., 1 P.M., 3 P.M. and 5 P.M. Adults $7.50, children from 2 to 12 $4. Information: (318) 228-8519. Accommodations

The Bois des Chenes Inn is at 338 North Sterling Street. The four suites range from $65 to $105, including breakfast. Telephone: (318) 233-7816. Dining

Mulate's is 15 miles from Lafayette at 325 Mills Avenue in Breaux Bridge. It is open daily for lunch and dinner. The telephone number outside Louisiana is (800) 422-2586; the in-state number is (800) 634-9880.

Randol's is in Lafayette at 2320 Kaliste Saloom Road. Lunch is served Monday to Friday; dinner is seven days a week. Telephone: (800) 962-2586. Events

Given the Cajun fondness for food and music, it's not surprising that they are good at throwing parties. Acadiana is full of festivals at almost any time of the year, both in Lafayette and the immediate area. Among the upcoming ones:

Cajun Mardi Gras will be held from Feb. 9 to 12. This is a chance to experience Mardi Gras outside the crowds and the chaos of New Orleans. Events include parades and costume contests as well as the Courir de Mardi Gras, a rural tradition in which riders on horseback go from house to house, collecting items for a community gumbo. It ends with a street dance.

Festival International de Louisiane, April 16 to 21. This is an international festival to celebrate Francophone culture. Participants come from as far away as Africa and Polynesia, as well as Haiti, France and Canada. There is continuous music on two stages as well as lots of street performers, performing arts, and a children's pavilion with hands-on activities.

Festivals Acadiens is traditionally held in the third week of September, Sept. 18 to 22 this year, throughout the city. A combination of seven festivals celebrates all aspects of Cajun culture.

For more information, call the Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission at (800) 346-1958. -- S. J.

SALLY JOHNSON, a frequent contributor to The Times, is editor of Vermont Sunday Magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 1991, on Page 5005008 of the National edition with the headline: The Cajun Kingdom Of the Bayou. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe